Sixteen-year-old Wren is an expert in the clock above the third pew of Cornerstone Community Church. She's spent her whole life watching it, mouthing hymns, and performing a certainty she can't locate anywhere inside herself.

Then she falls down a staircase at a geology museum. And the world shifts.

Now she can see them: symbols hovering above people's heads whenever they make a claim about belief. Gold for genuine, unwavering faith. Silver sparks for honest doubt woven through real belief. Grey static for performing certainty you don't feel. Black smoke for deliberate deception. And a quiet, clean absence — clear air — for the people who simply refuse to pretend.

What begins as a possible concussion artifact quickly becomes something Wren can't explain away. The symbols are too patterned. Too consistent. Too honest.

As she catalogues what she sees — in the congregation, in her gold-faith mother and her grey-static father, in her rigorously agnostic best friend Simone, and in a boy named Marcus whose silver sparks she can't stop thinking about — Wren begins to understand something she was never taught: there is a profound difference between faith and certainty. Between the performance of belief and the real thing.

PROOF is a coming-of-age story about a girl who learns to read what people actually believe — and discovers, in the process, something small and uncertain and entirely her own.

Perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson, Adam Silvera, and anyone who has ever sat in a room full of people and wondered which kind of believer — or non-believer — they really are.